


Knights of Neo-Skaia

by godtiermeme



Series: "Please stop writing these awful AKIRA-style AU's." [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Human, F/F, Gen, Human Experimentation, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:38:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4670399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godtiermeme/pseuds/godtiermeme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Homestuck Futuristic/Apocalypse AU heavily influenced by Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 animated Cyberpunk film, AKIRA.</p><p>The city of Skaia has two zones. The central zone is that of Neo-Skaia, and the wasteland which surrounds this is known as the slums. While those in the city live a bustling metropolitan lifestyle, the people in the nuclear wastelands of Skaia's former suburbs lead vastly different and undeniably more aggressive lives.</p><p>Dave Strider is just the semi-average man in the slums. He arrives in the area only a few years prior to the beginning of the story and opens his own small business as a mechanic.</p><p>Karkat Vantas is the youngest of the Vantas lineage. He lives a comfortable life in the city, where he is pampered by his famously wealthy family. When he decides to take a late night walk, however, things go awry. When he wakes, he finds himself in the presence of an enigmatic mechanic and in a world that's a far cry from the one he's always known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Project 596

The impetus for the events that transcended was quite simple. A man by the name of Karkat Vantas was wandering the city alone and late at night when he was spotted by some less-than-friendly folk. He was ambushed, beaten senseless, robbed of his possessions, and dumped in a vacant alleyway in the slums. Shortly thereafter, a more compassionate resident of the slums happened across the scene and decided to help the injured man.

And, so it was through this odd chain reaction that Karkat Vantas woke in a cramped corrugated metal shed. An unfamiliar smell surrounded him, and his wounds itched just as much as they uncomfortably burned. Above him was a sagging roof made of awkwardly thatched wire. Below him, he felt what a curious glance proved to be little more than a sheet of metal with a blanket laid over it.

“Fuck,” he growled. He sighed, closed his eyes, and opened them to find himself staring at a man whose pale face was offset by a pair of reflective black sunglasses and a handful of black wires that ran from the angles of his jaw and down to some unspecified point beneath his collar.

As Karkat tried to recover from his shock, the man smirked and spoke in a muffled, digitally distorted voice. “Well I’ll be damned. You’re actually awake?”

“No, I’m just having a nice fucking look around. Great rust you’ve got going on here,” snapped Karkat. “Who the hell are you and what the fuck happened?”

“Name’s Dave Strider,” retorted the smirking man. “Now, you ain’t going to last long if you keep flipping your collective shit like that. Calm down and rest.”

“What are you, a robot? Where am I and what the fuck happened? Do I need to reiterate that statement endlessly until the inevitable death of this fucking awful universe for you to understand that?” Here, Karkat paused. He sighed, muttered a few expletives under his breath, and rolled his eyes.

The other man—the strange blond who introduced himself as Dave—merely shrugged. “Found you outside of my house. Must’ve been walking around with a bit too much stuff, because you got a nice helping of knife to various parts of your body.” Here, he, too, paused. He turned around, exposing his back to the stranger he’d taken into his home, and began to rifle through a stack of oddly labelled glass bottles.

After a few moments, the man plucked a glass filled with an unknown clear liquid from the fray. He turned, held it out towards Karkat, and shrugged as he continued, “That should help for pain. We ain’t got much around here to keep flies from doing gross shit to you, so you’ll have to deal with the ointment.”

“I could get better treatment in a moldy toilet,” grumbled Karkat.

“Oh, I’m sure you could, Sir Money, but you ain’t in any shape to be moving,” snickered Dave. “I know who you are. I might not seem bright, but I’m great when it comes to the local dirt chat. Gossip and all that type of shit.”

“Yeah?” Karkat grunted.

“Yeah. You’re the Vantas kid. One of those way-up-there people of the world.”

A slow nod filled the time that Karkat spent formulating his response. “And you’re an insignificant person. Why, then, did you even bother helping me?”

“Well, for one, you were bleeding all over my front lawn. And you seem like a pretty decent guy.”

Again, Karkat returned with a slow nod. He took the small glass container—the one that Dave had been holding out for him for the past few minutes—and took a tentative sip. Then, he gagged.

Dave, meanwhile, let forth a quick snort of laughter. “Tastes like shit, but it’ll knock you on your ass in no time.” Having said this, he turned his back once more. There was a slight clatter of things being moved about before he turned around, this time with a glass of apple juice in his outstretched hand. “This should get rid of the taste.”

Karkat didn’t hesitate to take the offer. He snatched the glass and chugged until not a single drop remained. Then, he yawned.

“You’ll be asleep in no time, dude,” snickered Dave as he grabbed the tattered tablecloth he used as a blanket and threw it over his drowsy new acquaintance.

* * *

 

Rose Lalonde wasn’t actually related to Dave. They looked alike, but they shared absolutely no genetic similarities. Still, she’d found him covered in blood and wandering aimlessly around the ruins of what was once the suburbs of Skaia about seven years ago. She’d taken him in, nursed him back to health, and established a fierce but friendly rivalry with him.

Now, though, she found herself staring at him with a look of pure frustration. She toyed with her pale blond hair as she grumbled her frustrations to the smirking man. “You do realize you’ve just invited a whole fucking army of personal security guards to our front door, right? This is quite possibly the most decisively stupid plan you’ve ever managed to pry from the depths of your ass.”

Dave, in return, shrugged. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned his back against the concrete wall he was sitting against. “There’s no problem, Rose,” he reassured his unofficial sister. “Look, we ain’t got much to lose. What? Some shitty metal houses?”

“Fine!” exclaimed the exasperated woman as she threw her hands into the air. “Fine! You go frolic and dick around in places you shouldn’t be dicking around in and see how much I care!”

“M’kay. I’m just doing a good deed and hoping it’s like a boomerang that just circles right on back to me,” hummed Dave. “You know, I scratch your back and you scratch mine?”

“I staunchly refuse to touch you and more than is absolutely medically necessary,” muttered Rose.

“Suit yourself.” Dave shrugged. He offered a brief hint of a smile before rising to his feet. “I think the traders… Smugglers? Whatever the hell you call them. They’re here. And we’re running low on some stuff, so…” He paused, turned, and realized that Rose had left at some point. He was alone and, presumably, he’d been talking to himself. Not that it mattered to him. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his worn out jeans and wandered to the designated trading spot, regardless.

And, when he arrived, he was greeted by a man with a familiar, tan face. Across this face was spread a massive, toothy grin. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen your sorry butt around here,” the man snickered, running his long fingers through his thick black hair. “You said you needed blankets and bandages?”

Dave nodded. He fished around in his pocket before pulling out just below two hundred dollars—money he’d gathered from odd jobs around the slums and in the city. “Well, damn, John. You got the order right. There really is a first thing for everything.”

The trader—John—replied with an energetic laugh as he snatched the money out of Dave’s hand. He then turned, opened the trunk of his car, and pulled out a sizable paper bag of the aforementioned supplies. “You’re one hell of an overachiever, you asshole.”

“Yeah. Your point?” quipped Dave, shrugging. “So, any news from the city?”

“Nothing much. I’ll come and yell when something interesting happens, though. Don’t worry about that.” With this said, John offered a parting nod. “I’ve still got a few more deliveries left,” he explained as he clambered into his car. “Later, dude.”

“Later,” Dave acknowledged as he picked up the bag and wandered back to the metal shack he’d christened as his home.


	2. Latchkey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I started college a few weeks ago and I've been "busy" (AKA out of ideas) and now I finally got around to working on (AKA writing) this.

Karkat Vantas woke to the warmth of small slivers of sunlight—tiny, fine rays which pierced through the various cracks in the rusting metal walls—and to the sound of boiling water. He found Dave tinkering with a device—a small, one inch square box, whose wires led upwards to the pair of wires jutting from the angles of his jaw. And, under his breath, he uttered the first word that popped into his mind—“fuck.”

Dave, in return, glanced towards his newfound roommate. He smirked, snapped the back cover into place on the odd device, and let it drop behind his shirt. “You’re awake earlier than I thought you’d be,” he commented, cocking his head to the side like a curious dog. “I’ll need to check the expiration dates on those bottles…”

“What was that shit?” Karkat grumbled. As he spoke, he thought back to what felt like a few hours ago. After a few seconds, he distinctly recalled drinking some sort of clear liquid before falling asleep. “What the fuck did you do?”

“I knocked you out for a while,” Dave shrugged. He wandered to a small, hissing stove and peered at the boiling pot atop its surface. With an approving nod, he opened the nearby cupboard and rummaged through its contents. And, as he did this, he continued, “You should be feeling a little better now. I mean, you ain’t about to go skipping through any flower fields, but you should be good to leave in the next week.”

After a few bewildered blinks, Karkat slowly nodded. At the same time, he had to admit that he _did_ feel better. He certainly wasn’t in as much pain as he had been, and his wounds (the ones he could see, at least) seemed to be doing well. So, with as much sincerity as he could muster in his precarious half-awake state, he replied, “Yeah. I… Thanks. I guess.”

“No problem.” By this point, Dave had located a beaten up wooden ladle and two burnt ceramic plates. He doled out a good amount of odd-looking watery mush into one bowl and approached Karkat, setting it at the end of the metal bed with a vague hint of a smile. “It ain’t five start cooking, but it’s as close as you’ll get around here. John taught me how to make it.”

Peering into the bowl, Karkat couldn’t help but feel like Dave’s advice was a bit of an understatement. The contents were little more than watery vegetable and rice soup. Still, he was hungry, and staring at the bowl wasn’t getting him anywhere. So, with a shrug, he slurped up a good deal of the bland broth. Admittedly, it tasted much better than he thought it would. Not that it was something he’d eat on a daily basis; but, he could certainly tolerate it for the time being. “Where exactly am I, anyhow?”

“Old Skaia, western district,” Dave shrugged. “Why?”

“It’d be nice to know where the fuck I am for future reference…” Karkat, too, shrugged. Having come to the conclusion that the meal wasn’t exactly terrible, he proceeded to hastily down the remaining portion.

“Makes sense," Dave shrugged. He offered a brief flash of an oddly reassuring smile. “You done with that bowl?”

After a moment’s pause—a brief break that Karkat used to assess the situation through the somewhat clogged filter of his mind—he nodded. He passed the bowl off to Dave. “Yeah. So… Um… What the fuck happened? Like, I know that I probably walked into the wrong place but…”

“I’m not really sure,” Dave quickly admitted. “I just found you around here. You’d been beaten up and presumably robbed. Not too sure about the details.” Humming an odd sort of tune—one that seemed rather familiar, yet wholly unnamable to the Karkat—he took the bowl. He rinsed it out in a small, rusty sink and set it out on a mesh drying rack.

 “And exactly what the fuck do you do around here? I mean… We’re in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere, if that makes sense…”

“Yeah. It sure as hell does. And I agree with you. But I hold down a minor job as a mechanic.” Dave paused. He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair and heaved a short, thoughtful sigh before continuing, “Actually, one of my regulars talks about you from time to time. Some odd biker gang member… Sollux? He’s good business. Great at what he does, not so great at learning when his bike hits its limit.”

“You know Sollux?” snapped an unabashedly incredulous Karkat. Albeit, as he said this, he had to admit that the facts Dave gave were perfectly accurate. Still, the concept that someone he knew could know someone who lived this far away from the main city baffled him. “I mean, he always says he’s got an out-of-the-way mechanic. Says it’s a fucking nightmare to get the bike out for repairs, but…”

“Yep,” Dave interjected. “That’s me.” Here, he added a vague semblance of a smirk and a casual wave. “Anyhow, yeah, I do bike repair for some people. Mainly reckless fuckers with no idea how to actually ride one. But Sollux is one of the exceptions. And I sure as hell ain’t about to complain about him or all the incompetent assholes giving me business.”

Karkat, despite his former position, nodded slowly. He let the thought simmer on one of his mind’s many and mostly unattended backburners. “You get a lot of business out here?”

Dave paused, shrugged, and sighed. “Not really.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Then, there was silence—or a rather abrupt conversational death. Both had reached a point where there was nothing left to say, but neither seemed willing to do anything to really fix the situation. So, instead, Karkat busied himself with studying the crude wooden ceiling and Dave finished cleaning up what had presumably been breakfast.

Once Dave finished, though, he was quick to rectify the situation. And, for him, the solution was to leave. He offered a muttered swift farewell under his breath, shoved his hands into his pockets, and shuffled out of the shack as quickly as he could.

Karkat, meanwhile, took the subsequent absence as a chance to sleep off the still-lingering effects of the sedative.

 

* * *

 

Spades Slick wasn’t exactly the type of person who formed relationships with people outside of his normal ring of accomplices. He was an underground criminal—the type of guy paid to do dirty work. And he hated his job, though he didn’t quite hate it enough to seek out alternate employment. Instead, he let his annoyance simmer quietly in the back of his mind. And, he took comfort in some of his more loyal and generous clients, one of whom he affectionately referred to as Crabdad—the patriarch of the Vantas family. And, at a certain point, he was hired by Crabdad to perform some very specific dirty work.

His assignment?

Well, to him, it was simple. He was to find the youngest of the Vantas family, return him, and kill anyone with any sort of unofficial connection to the boy. Presumably, it was all to keep family secrets from getting out. Really, though, the reasons didn’t matter to Spades. All he really cared for was getting the job done and getting paid.

**Author's Note:**

> UPDATE: Working on an update but I've changed the chapter names to randomly chosen nuclear test code names isn't that just super bright and cheerful?.  
> Comments and feedback are welcome and appreciated!


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